Gabriella Y. Carolini

The 21st century health challenge of slums and cities

2Starting in 2007, and for the first time in human history, the majority of the world’s population will live in urban areas. According to the latest UN projections, 3 by 2030, the world’s urban population will increase by more than two billion, while the rural population will decline by about 20 million. This shift is largely the culmination of a rapid global urbanisation process that has been underway for more than 250 years. Rapid urbanisation first became manifest in the countries undergoing industrialisation in the developed world, and then in Latin America. Today its prime locus is the poorer parts of Asia and Africa. More than 90% of the world’s urban population growth by 2030 will be in less developed regions. Any effort to measurably improve global health outcomes, especially in these regions, will need to address urban reform. According to estimates prepared by the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), about a third of the world’s estimated 3 billion current urban residents dwell in slums, or places characterised by one or more of these shortcomings: insecurity of tenure, poor structural housing conditions, deficient access to safe drinking water and sanitation, and severe overcrowding. 4 All these factors have direct

The promise of proximity: The politics of knowledge and learning in South–South cooperation between water operators

This paper seeks to illuminate the multiple ways in which South–South collaboration may reorganize knowledge production and learning processes across scales and beyond the unilateral transfer of expertise. Drawing on empirical evidence from a knowledge exchange partnership between water and sanitation operators in Salta, Argentina, and Brasília, Brazil, we provide a grounded, contextual account of the partnership to examine what was learned, under what circumstances, and with what potential effects. We contend that common claims by proponents of South–South cooperation around the centrality of shared geopolitical history are not enough to understand South–South cooperation at the project level. At this scale, we find that other forms of proximity, including organizational, linguistic, technological, and cultural, also matter in shaping the constitution of collaborative partnerships and the forms of learning that occur through them. In the case that we examine, partners’ multiple shared proximities resulted in a subversion of traditional mentor–mentee relations and emergence of a process of mutual learning. Further, we suggest that flows of knowledge in the partnership can be characterized across a learning spectrum, from technical and processual learning to experiential understanding and self-reflection, each with different consequences for institutional and material change at different scales. Crucially, such forms of learning bolstered participants’ bargaining power for implementing improvements at home and fostered advances in operators’ tactical thinking.

Perverting Progress? The Challenges of Implementing both Fiscal and Social Responsibility in São Paulo (1995–2010)

The turn of the 21st century saw two important pieces of legislation introduced in Brazil: the Law of Fiscal Responsibility or LFR (2000) and the City Statute (2001). While each law has been celebrated, this article argues that a perversion of their intentions is emerging in practice. The scale and scope of municipal budget composition and allocations in the period studied (1995–2010) give reason to question how these landmark laws are being locally interpreted. Evidence details a disproportionate rise in current expenditures in all state capitals in Brazil since the introduction of the LFR. Further, among state capitals with the largest number of ‘sub-normal agglomerations’, a few key cities show a peculiarly stagnant proportion of expenditures directed towards housing and urbanisation. A case study of São Paulo is presented to explore explanations for these trends and understand what they mean for the direction and control over upgrading investments in that city.